Sundance – Macleans.cahttp://www.macleans.ca
Canada's national weekly current affairs magazineSat, 10 Dec 2016 00:57:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.2A genre-defying film that lands its moon-landing jokeshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/a-genre-defying-film-that-lands-its-moon-landing-jokes/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/a-genre-defying-film-that-lands-its-moon-landing-jokes/#respondFri, 22 Jan 2016 07:35:24 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=824195Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson’s new movie, set to premiere at the Sundance festival, is as real as a fake doc about a hoax can get

Moon-landing conspiracies are almost as old as the moon landing itself. Yet somehow they endure, apparently just as seductive as they were 45 years ago: this month sees the unveiling of not one but two feature films—the middling comedy Moonwalkers and the genre-defying Operation: Avalanche—that present mankind’s singularly greatest achievement as a sham.

The idea behind Operation: Avalanche: In the summer of 1968, NASA and the U.S. government realized they were going to lose the race to the moon. Thus began a cataclysmic cover-up. Jobs were lost, a nation lied to. Shot illegally inside NASA, Avalanche is a “documentary” that takes us into that story, down to a reconstructed, to-scale Apollo Lunar Module and an official NASA scientist divulging how the moon landing would be staged. Except, of course, it’s entirely fake.

“This was the ultimate snow job,” says Matt Johnson, the film’s director said in his Toronto apartment, days before the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where his unique film will have its world premiere. (While Avalanche was reportedly slated to premiere at TIFF last September, Sundance and the snowy vibe of Park City seem the perfect setting for a cheeky Canuck to undermine American history.)

When it comes to Johnson’s career, it’s snow jobs all the way down. The filmmaker made news in Canada and beyond after winning the grand prize at the 2013 Slamdance Film Festival for his debut fake school-shooting documentary The Dirties, for which the 31-year-old Johnson infiltrated a school and posed as a student to shoot his run-and-gun sequences undercover. In Avalanche, even with the added challenge of a ’60s period setting, Johnson and company are trespassing again, this time on U.S. government property.

To top it all off, there’s the plan for an episode of his upcoming narrative TV series for Vice: Johnson plans to do all his Avalanche press in character—as a fictional dude who’s made a movie called Operation: Avalanche that landed itself in Sundance. This mischievous dance between truth and myth is at the heart of Johnson’s genius.

There’s a twinkle in Johnson’s eye that tells you the kind of filmmaker he is. In the film, the unflinchingly quick Johnson strolls on to the faked set of 2001: A Space Odyssey to talk to a real-live Stanley Kubrick (“It’s for a friend, and his name is Matt Johnson,” he stammers, asking the film legend for an autograph).

A fake documentary about the staging of the moon landing? “You can’t pitch it,” he admits. He and his friends—including Owen Williams, Josh Boles and Jared Raab, who all appear in the film—pitched it anyway. In 2014, Canadian-American distribution company Lionsgate picked up the film, giving Johnson’s team the impetus to make the film on a Canadian bank loan. “This movie would be a huge deal if it was Matt Damon and George Clooney sneaking into the CIA to fake the moon landing! That’s a $50-million dollar movie that [would play] all over the world, and everybody [would] love.”

Johnson’s version was made for a humble $1 million, and he sees it in the same vein as films like his idol Orson Welles’s beguiling F for Fake—a pseudo-documentary about two fraud artists. Like The Dirties, Avalanche isn’t a mockumentary—because it’s presented to the audience as real. “It’s not a lie if you believe it,” the poster exclaims, echoing Seinfeld’s George Costanza. Johnson goes to great lengths to ensure his audiences believe him.

“It’s absurd to think we didn’t land on the moon,” he notes, which is partly why the film is so much fun. It’s invigorating to watch a skeleton crew pull off a pitch-perfect period thriller, and in rethinking what Canadian film can be. “I want so badly for people to think of Canadian film as being what it really is: small, new, and young,” says Johnson.

A bold claim, though in terms of stirring the pot, Johnson’s production company, Zapruder Films, is just getting started: its next project, simply titled Canada, is about a conspiracy between Sir John A. Macdonald, George Brown and Alexander Galt to build a railroad—which is why they’re confederating. “It’s Chinatown meets All the President’s Men set in the 1800s with action set pieces,” he said. “I play John A. Macdonald.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/a-genre-defying-film-that-lands-its-moon-landing-jokes/feed/0Whistler Film Festival scales new heightshttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/brian-d-johnson/the-whistler-film-festival-scales-new-heights/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/brian-d-johnson/the-whistler-film-festival-scales-new-heights/#respondTue, 04 Dec 2012 22:05:16 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=323270With Daniel Radcliffe on the red carpet and Chinese studios hunting Canadian scripts, the festival has raised its game

George Stroumboulopoulos (left) and Daniel Radcliffe at the Whistler Film Festival (Courtesy WFF 2012)

I’ve been a devotee of the Whistler Film Festival for most of the past decade. Cannes and TIFF are both essential and vast, but these festivals unfold on such an industrial scale that they’re no longer, well, festive. For a film critic on the assembly line of world cinema, they’re more work than fun. Whistler, which wrapped its 12th edition this past weekend, has always been the festival I most look forward to. It doesn’t hurt that skiing is part of the program—unlike Sundance, the WFF encourages it, and with its Celebrity Ski Challenge, the mountain becomes part of the program. But Whistler’s five-day extravaganza also brings together filmmakers, media and industry folk with unparalleled energy and intimacy.

As a guest of the festival, I wore two hats this year, as a journalist and a member of the documentary jury. And it was evident to me and everyone I talked to that this was the year Whistler raised its game. There was some serious star wattage on the red carpet, with visitors such as Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), James Cromwell (Babe) and writer-actor Rashida Jones (The Social Network). But there was also a stronger international industry presence, with Variety‘s 10 Screenwriters to Watch panel—and the inaugural China Gateway Film Script Competition in which a dozen Canadian writer-producer teams pitched feature projects to three Chinese studios. The winners could end up triggering co-production deals worth up to $15 million. (The winning pitches were Butterfly Tale, an animated 3D movie from Quebec; Blush, a B.C.-driven romantic comedy about a Chinese woman in Paris; and The Eddie Zhao Story, another B.C. project, based on the true story of a Chinese peasant who chases an American conman to Los Angeles.)

With this China co-pro initiative, Whistler comes full circle. Its marquee award, the $15,000 Borsos Prize for best Canadian feature, is named for Philip Borsos, the late B.C. filmmaker known for The Grey Fox (1982)—and Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990), which starred Donald Sutherland in the very first China-Canada co-production. Completing the symmetry, Sutherland’s Bethune co-star Helen Shaver was a member of this year’s Borsos jury, along with actors Liane Balaban (One Week), Rachelle Lefevre (Twilight), and producer Martin Katz (Cosmopolis).

The 2012 Borsos Prize went to writer-director Kate Melville for her feature debut, Picture Day, a coming-of-age story about a rebellious teenage girl and the vaguely autistic boy who is obsessed with her. The film’s star, Tatiana Maslany, received the award for best performance among the eight movies in the Borsos competition. The jury called her “fearless, honest, unapologetic, heartbreaking, and hilarious… in our opinion…a force of nature.” The jury also gave a special commendation to Marie-Evelyne Lessard for her riveting performance as a carnival worker in Les manèges humains(Fair Sex), by Quebec director Martin Laroche.

Among the eight filmmakers in the World Documentary Competition, Montreal director Karen Cho won for the NFB opus, Status Quo?, which investigates what has, and has not, changed for Canadian women and families since Canada’s Royal Commission On the Status of Women tabled its report in 1971. This is vital film. That was the unanimous conclusion of our jury—my fellow jurists were Toronto actress Sarain Boylan and N. Bird Runningwater, director of the Sundance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Program. We praised this “documentary report on the status of women” for its “tenacious research and analysis,” as well as its “relevance, courage and ambition in taking on a task that the government has failed to address.” Being on a jury beats solitary film criticism. In the spirit of the festival, it was more fun than work.

The WFF’s new programmer, Paul Gratton, who came aboard only last June, put together a substantial and provocative program. For the first time, it included late-night screenings of horror films, kicking off with American Mary, an international cult hit by Vancouver’s outrageous twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soskia, who posed on the red carpet in kinky lab-coat fetish wear. Meanwhile, spitfire Shauna Hardy Mishaw, the festival’s executive-director, continues to push the WFF toward the big time with the indomitable will of an Olympic ski coach. She calls Whistler the world’s “coolest” festival, which is a credible boast. But it’s also a festival of rare warmth, an industry hot tub that goes from salon to saloon in a twinkling. And its fancy yet casual soirees, at restaurants like Araxi and Barefoot Bistro, offer a level of gastro luxury that outpaces TIFF and Cannes.

I’m always curious to see how veterans of the festival circuit respond to Whistler the first time they come. “What’s great about it is that it does what festivals are supposed to do,” says producer Martin Katz, who’s also Chair of Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. “It brings people together and allows them to run into each other casually. Other mountain festivals like Sundance have higher profiles, but they don’t have a locus.” Another first-time visitor, Mark Sloane, senior vice-president at Alliance Films, was pumped about the possibilities. He suggested that Whistler, with its proximity to L.A., is perfectly placed and timed to position itself as an pre-Oscar campaign site to kick off the awards season. That goal would make it less like Sundance, and more like Canada’s prelude to January’s Palm Springs International Film Festival.

To achieve high-level status, however, one thing Whistler lacks is a proper gala screening facility. With banquet chairs and a sub-par sound system, the Whistler Conference Centre affords a makeshift solution. But Sundance started with inadequate screening facilities 28 years ago. And Whistler organizers are in the thick of a fund-raising drive to build a state of the art cinema. For a sponsor like Bell or Rogers, buying the naming rights to such a high-profile bricks-and-mortar showcase should be a no-brainer. Once it has a good cinema, there’s nothing stopping Whistler from becoming one of the top summits of the world festival circuit.

Bingham Ray, one of the most beloved champions of American independent cinema has died. Ray, co-founder of October Films and lately executive-director of the San Francisco Film Society, suffered a stroke Friday while attending the Sundance Film Festival. He died today in hospital surrounded by family. He was 57.

While Harvey Weinstein is the only indie mogul to become famous, we’ve seen less celebrated U.S. distribution executives driven by a passion for the art, men like Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of Sony Classics. Bingham Ray was one of them. I met him when I was researching my history of the Toronto International Film Festival, Brave Films Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever (2000). He was a generous interview, a joy to talk to, and bracingly candid. Here’s a passage from the book about a legendary bidding war between Bingham and Harvey Weinstein for Robert Duvall’s The Apostle at the 1997 edition of TIFF:

“. . . By midnight Miramax and October were slugging it out. Harvey Weinstein was in New York, bargaining by phone—he had watched The Apostle at a simultaneous private screening that night. Bingham Ray, October’s buyer, had left the Toronto premiere after forty-five minutes to make his bid. He was desperate to get the film. Octdober had just been bought by Universal that summer and was itching to take on Miramax. ‘We were dealing with the studio’s money, the house money,’ Ray explains, ‘and we wanted to stir it up to send a signal. There are all kinds of reasons to buy movies. The right reasons are because you love them and there’s an audience for them and you can build long-lasting relationships with the people who made them. Then there’s just trying to get on the map in a big, sexy way. October wasn’t bought by Universal to be a nice high-end art-house company. They wanted a vehicle to really compete with Miramax. I think that’s folly. Harvey had become a serious mogul. At October we were just getting our feet wet.’

“Bingham Ray pulled Duvall’s agent, Cassian Elwes, into October’s office at the Sheraton. ‘It’s the old thing—you never let the guy get out of the room,’ he says. ‘But Cassian had to check with Duvall. Then he fielded offers from Miramax, back and forthand back and forth. At one point we felt we were being really jerked around. I didn’t like the smell of it. And we pulled out. This was two or three in the morning. The price was up to $7.5 million. Then Cassian split. He ran down the hallway. He escaped. I came back, despairing that we couldn’t keep him in the room. This pressurized deal-making was clouding our judgement. I’d never operated like that before. I don’t believe you can see forty-five minutes of a movie and make a decision.’

‘October finally bought The Apostle for $5 million. Harvey Weinstein later claimed he didn’t even want the movie, that he was only jacking up the price. “He said he was just jerking our chain,’ says Ray, ‘and it could have been that we were being played, because we were susceptible to being played. But the movie did $25 million. Duvall was nominated for best actor, and in North America it was a huge success for us, even if we paid an outrageous amount of money to get it.’ ”

It’s rare that you see a romance without the obligatory comedy. Unless it’s a flat-out tearjerker. Even edgy indie filmmakers don’t usually let the rom-com ratio drop much lower than 60/40. And the lack of cute comedy is just one of the things that’s so refreshing about Like Crazy. It’s not a rom-com. It’s a romantic drama that unfolds uncannily like life itself, without the forced punctuation of ironic beats and witty aperçus that even the most authentic indie filmmakers feel obliged to sew into the lining of their scripts. That’s partly because Like Crazy—which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance—had no scripted dialogue. The actors improvised. And the result is a pure, unaffected romance, a tale of two lovers who struggle to remain true to each other after they are separated by cruel circumstance.

U.S. actor Anton Yelchin (Star Wars) and Britain’s Felicity Jones (The Tempest, Page 8) star as Jacob and Anna, who meet as college students in California and become long-distance lovers, living continents apart after Anna violates the term of her U.S. student visa. Homeland security thwarts romantic security. She’s a writer; he designs furniture. Temporarily separated, they pursue their careers in L.A. and London, while trying to remain faithful. What goes on between Yelchin and Jones is so tender, intimate and real that it’s hard to believe we get to watch. And no, I’m not talking about sex—there’s nothing explicit on display—just emotion.

“Every scene in Like Crazy was treated like a sex scene,” says U.S. director Drake Doremus (Douchebag), “even though there are no typical sex scenes. But the feeling was always that we’d closed the door and everything inside was safe and intimate, yet also wide open.” The director adds that he was trying to make a film in the style of the French New Wave, and drew inspiration from Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien and Lars Von Trier’s Breaking The Waves. With its thin narrative, Like Crazy doesn’t measure up to those films, but you can see the influence. The actors’ improv performances don’t feel like performances. Yet this is not the wise-assed improv of actors trying to be smart or funny. Yelchin and Jones engage in a sincere, seamless give-and-take that makes you sit up and think (a) that’s exactly how people behave in a relationship and (b) it’s hard to remember seeing an American film with so little business cluttering up the dialogue.

Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones in 'Like Crazy'

Aside from foreign language films, the comparisons that come to mind are English. There’s a certain similarity to Mike Leigh, especially in the scenes with Anna’s chatty upper-middle class parents, but while Leigh’s dialogue is improvised, his intricate dramas tend to be more torqued that this one. Like Crazy has more in common with the loose, airy tone of Michael Winterbottom’s work, notably Wonderland.

But enough with scrambling for analogies. What’s remarkable about Like Crazy is that it doesn’t remind us of anything else, and we don’t feel for a second that the director, unlike so many of his American indie peers, is diabolically referencing other movies. The film’s magic lies in the body language of the two leads, whether they’re rolling around in bed or circling each other in the kitchen. As Doremus suggests, even when they’re not having sex their physical chemistry is in play. Which brings me to another first: I can’t remember when I’ve seen a movie with so many lyrical scenes that take place in bed without devolving into sex. Yet their tension is tangible—physical—first in its erotic comfort, then in the strain of heartache. We can feel its tidal force pulling them together and apart.

Doremus shoots in a vérité style, but it’s calm, not jittery. The direction doesn’t call attention to itself, aside from some deft jump cuts and smash cuts. But they seem less like a New Wave affectation than a judicious device for leaving out chunks of narrative, suggesting that, as close as we may feel to this couple, we can’t possibly see their whole story. I’m loathe to dip into the plot except to say that both Anna and Jacob each develop relationships in their home countries during their separation. He hooks up with an assistant in his L.A. design studio played by Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone); she befriends a neighbour in her London flat played by Charlie Bewley. Aside from that, let’s just say there’s no predicting how this relationship will end. But I can guarantee it’s neither cute nor tidy.